Hello,

A client has Office 2003 on XP Pro with McAfee Security Center, all fully
updated. on a P4/3GHz/1G RAM/80G hard drive with plenty of space.

When starting Outlook (which opens to the Inbox) with the preview pane on,
it takes an interminable amount of time -- over a minute -- to fully start
so that we can do anything with it. The preview pane is the last element
of the display to be rendered. If the preview pane is disabled, Outlook
starts very quickly, within about 5 seconds. However, if we then try to
open a message for the first time in its own window, we still have to wait
a long time for the window to be drawn. Outlook appears to freeze.

When viewing Task Manager/Processes while waiting for the message to open,
Outlook consumes 50% of processor time until the message is displayed.
System Idle Processes and other normal things consume the rest. Memory
usage is normal.

However, when viewing subsequent messages in the preview pane or in their
own window, they open quickly, as they normally do.

I've disabled all add-ins.

Previously, when image downloading was disabled, all messages opened slowly.
When I enabled image downloading, only the first message opened slowly.
However, I may have made a couple of other configuration changes at the same
time, but I can't remember them. Nevertheless, that was the only one I made
of significance before subsequent messages began opening normally.

This phenomenon has appeared only within the last month. My client says
they have not installed any new software. As near as they can recall, it
began happening just after the May updates were published.

I've searched the MSKB and this forum and can find nothing. I'm hoping that
someone has some ideas. I'm stumped.

--
David Dickinson
eveningstar at die-spammer-die dash mvps dot org
Please reply only to the newsgroup, not by email.